Genomic Scores

As we have seen earlier, genomic scores are often stored in wiggle format.

igv


Genomic Scores

A perhaps more common human readable format is bedGraph.

igv

Genomic Scores

Genomic Scores are heavily used in Genomics and High throughput sequencing as they offer a simple mechanism to review a defined metric over the linear genome at a specified resolution.

  • RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq signals (as well many other seq types).
  • Phylogenetic conservation.

Our Genomic Scores data.

From our last session we identified Myc peaks within the Igfbp2 locus and in IGV compared Myc ChIP-seq signal from Encode over our peaks.

Genomic Scores in Bioconductor.

Two popular Bioconductor packages for dealing with Genomics Scores are:

  • rtracklayer – Importing/exporting genomic intervals into/out of R.
  • GenomicRanges – Handling genomic intervals in R.

Genomic Scores in Bioconductor.

Now we have the package installed, we can load the library rtracklayer which we will use to import and export from/to bedGraph and bigWig.

library(rtracklayer)

Genomic Scores in Bioconductor.

We will also be making use of the functions in the GenomicRanges package. We dont need to load GenomicRanges directly here because the rtracklayer does this for us.

Package dependencies and imports allow one package to make use of functions from another.

Reading in a bedGraph.

The rtracklayer package provides functions to import genomic scores from a bedGraph using the import.bedGraph() function.

myBedG <- import.bedGraph("../../Data/TSS_ENCFF940MBK.bedGraph")

Reading in a bedGraph.

Because we only have 4 columns in a bedGraph and no strand information, the GRanges intervals are unstranded with * in their strand column

strand(myBedG)
## factor-Rle of length 2161 with 1 run
##   Lengths: 2161
##   Values :    *
## Levels(3): + - *

Reading in a bigWig

The import bigWig’s genomic scores are again imported as a GRanges object containing the same information as the imported bedGraph.

myBigWig[1:3]
## GRanges object with 3 ranges and 1 metadata column:
##       seqnames               ranges strand |             score
##          <Rle>            <IRanges>  <Rle> |         <numeric>
##   [1]     chr1 [       1, 72811054]      * |                 0
##   [2]     chr1 [72811055, 72811119]      * | 0.690400004386902
##   [3]     chr1 [72811120, 72811145]      * | 0.578019976615906
##   -------
##   seqinfo: 54 sequences from an unspecified genome

GenomicScores as a RLE

We can however specify the type of objects we would like to return from the import.bedGraph and import.bw functions.

Here we will import the bigWig as a object we have briefly seen, the Rle object (run length encoding). Here we have an Rlelist (a list of Rle objects)

myBigWig <- import.bw("../../Data/TSS_ENCFF940MBK.bw",
                      as = "RleList")
class(myBigWig)
## [1] "SimpleRleList"
## attr(,"package")
## [1] "IRanges"

Rle in genomics

Run length encoding allows for a very efficient storage of long stretchs of repeated values.

We have already seen an rle in our cigar string from SAM files.

  • 100M - 100 matches to reference for alignment
  • 28M1D72M - 28 matches, 1 deletion and 72 matches for aligment

Rle in genomics

Now can construct a named RleList containing the Rle objects using the RleList() function.

myNumbers2 <- c(0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2)
chr1Scores <- Rle(myNumbers)
chr2Scores <- Rle(myNumbers2)
myRleList <- RleList(chr1=chr1Scores,chr2=chr2Scores)
myRleList
## RleList of length 2
## $chr1
## numeric-Rle of length 13 with 3 runs
##   Lengths: 5 3 5
##   Values : 0 1 0
## 
## $chr2
## numeric-Rle of length 13 with 3 runs
##   Lengths: 5 3 5
##   Values : 0 1 2

Indexing an RLElist

To access elements of a RleList we can use our regular accessors for lists $ and [[]].

Here we retrieve the Rle object named chr1 containing all the genomic scores information for chromosome 1.

chr1_rle <- myBigWig$chr1
# Or
chr1_rle <- myBigWig[["chr1"]]
chr1_rle
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 2108 runs
##   Lengths:           72811054                 65 ...          122614997
##   Values :                  0  0.690400004386902 ...                  0

Replacement in an RLE.

We can also replace values in a Rle, just as we would with a vector.

Here i replace values for all basepairs between 1 and 10 to 100

chr1_rle[1:10] <- 100
chr1_rle
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 2109 runs
##   Lengths:                 10           72811044 ...          122614997
##   Values :                100                  0 ...                  0

Converting to other data types

Or to a data.frame

rleAsDF <- as.data.frame(chr1_rle[1:10])
rleAsDF
##    value
## 1    100
## 2    100
## 3    100
## 4    100
## 5    100
## 6    100
## 7    100
## 8    100
## 9    100
## 10   100

Operations on RLE. (Arithmetric and Mathematical)

We can use many simple arithmetric operations such as +, -, / and *****

chr1_rle+1000
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 2109 runs
##   Lengths:               10         72811044 ...        122614997
##   Values :             1100             1000 ...             1000
(chr1_rle+1000)*10
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 2109 runs
##   Lengths:               10         72811044 ...        122614997
##   Values :            11000            10000 ...            10000

Operations on RLE. (Arithmetric and Mathematical)

We use this logical Rle to replace values less than 10 with 0 as we would use a logical vector with standard vectors.

chr1_rle[chr1_rle < 10] <- 0
chr1_rle
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 122 runs
##   Lengths:               10         72823081 ...        122627007
##   Values :              100                0 ...                0

Operations on RLELists

Very usefully, We can also apply arithmetic and mathematical operations to whole RleLists as imported from the bigWig file.

myBigWig <- import.bw("../../Data/TSS_ENCFF940MBK.bw",as="RleList")
myBigWig+10
## RleList of length 54
## $chr1
## numeric-Rle of length 195471971 with 2108 runs
##   Lengths:         72811054               65 ...        122614997
##   Values :               10 10.6904000043869 ...               10
## 
## $chr10
## numeric-Rle of length 130694993 with 1 run
##   Lengths: 130694993
##   Values :        10
## 
## $chr11
## numeric-Rle of length 122082543 with 1 run
##   Lengths: 122082543
##   Values :        10
## 
## $chr12
## numeric-Rle of length 120129022 with 1 run
##   Lengths: 120129022
##   Values :        10
## 
## $chr13
## numeric-Rle of length 120421639 with 1 run
##   Lengths: 120421639
##   Values :        10
## 
## ...
## <49 more elements>

Subsetting RleLists with a GRanges.

We can in fact use GRanges objects to index our RleList objects.The GRanges provides the intervals from which genomic scores are retrieved. The resulting RleList object contains an entry with the scores for each interval in the GRanges object.

To demonstrate first we can retrieve the Myc Peaks calls which overlap the region we are reviewing.

myRanges <- GRanges("chr1",ranges = IRanges(72811055,72856974))
mycPeaks <- import.bed("../../Data/Myc_Ch12_1_withInput_Input_Ch12_summits.bed")
mycPeaks <- resize(mycPeaks,50,fix="center")
newMycPeaks <- mycPeaks[mycPeaks %over% myRanges]
newMycPeaks
## GRanges object with 2 ranges and 2 metadata columns:
##       seqnames               ranges strand |
##          <Rle>            <IRanges>  <Rle> |
##   [1]     chr1 [72824021, 72824070]      * |
##   [2]     chr1 [72844876, 72844925]      * |
##                                           name     score
##                                    <character> <numeric>
##   [1] Myc_Ch12_1_withInput_Input_Ch12_peak_246  18.55062
##   [2] Myc_Ch12_1_withInput_Input_Ch12_peak_247   9.27569
##   -------
##   seqinfo: 21 sequences from an unspecified genome; no seqlengths

RleLists and GRanges.

With the RleList containing our scores over the Myc peaks we can now gather summary statistics as with all RleList objects

sum(rleOverGranges)
##      chr1      chr1 
## 1009.0643  480.4242

Exporting an RLElist

Now we have our RleList object we export this to a bigWig using the export.bw() function.

export.bw(myRleList,con="chr1_Myc.bw")

Importing large files

When importing only a portion of a bigWig we simply need to specify a GRanges of regions we wish to retrieve to the BigWigSelection() function.

Here we will use the Myc Peaks in our window as the GRanges of regions for selection.

newMycPeaks
## GRanges object with 2 ranges and 2 metadata columns:
##       seqnames               ranges strand |
##          <Rle>            <IRanges>  <Rle> |
##   [1]     chr1 [72824021, 72824070]      * |
##   [2]     chr1 [72844876, 72844925]      * |
##                                           name     score
##                                    <character> <numeric>
##   [1] Myc_Ch12_1_withInput_Input_Ch12_peak_246  18.55062
##   [2] Myc_Ch12_1_withInput_Input_Ch12_peak_247   9.27569
##   -------
##   seqinfo: 21 sequences from an unspecified genome; no seqlengths

Time for an exercise.

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